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That's great! Apple has the resources to incentivize and invest in alternate production capacity(Intel, Samsung, or others). Sure, it will take years, but a thousand mile journey begins with one step...
Apple can and should do it again!
Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs. Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only pr…
Ha! Well if it isn't karma that has come for Apple. (Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way at TSMC)
...and then China invades Taiwan, and nobody ain't getting nothing.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
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Explains why Apple is looking to diversify their fabs with Intel. If Intel can stay on their current trajectory and become a legitimate alternative they will do very well as a fab with additional available capacity.
Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs. Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only pr…
I tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one is never going away, and the second one might?
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.